In New South Wales as for other Australian colonies, the achievement of mainly free, compulsory and secular public education systems in the 1870s was a cause of self- satisfaction and a belief that late nineteenth-century Australian public schools were among the best in the world. In this paper, the process by which this self-satisfaction was contested, and eventually turned to the reform of public education, is traced. The tendencies that led to the adoption of the comprehensive secondary school in New South Wales in the mid-twentieth century form the focus of the paper. Issues and events of importance include the critique of public education in New South Wales in 1901 by a professor at the University of Sydney followed by a Royal Commission (Knibbs and Turner) and the progressivism of Peter Board, the Director of Public Education in early twentieth-century New South Wales. His responsiveness to the New Education and the experience of his travels in Europe and North America combined in his efforts to open new free public high schools. The second part of the paper examines the proposals for the reform of secondary education in the context of the New Education Fellowship Conference of 1937. Proposals for progressive pedagogy and new and inclusive visions of secondary education were mainly ineffective as a result of the after-effects of the Great Depression, and the declaration of war in 1939. The frustratingly slow production of ideas and plans for progressive reform in secondary education that characterized the 1920s-1940s was overtaken by the social democratic and postwar reconstruction movements of the 1950s. In New South Wales, as for the United Kingdom, the main difficulty standing in the way of reform was the apparent incompatibility of two versions of progressive reform. One insisted that youth with different abilities and intelligences required different schools for the fulfilling of their potentials. The other argued that a common school was the way forward. This paper shows that the eventual decision to establish comprehensive high schools was very dependent on the debates of the previous half-century. The paper also discusses the character of the dominant form of progressivism as it was experienced in New South Wales. In the secondary area, "administrative" progressivism was far more influential than pedagogic reform. The paper concludes with an assessment of the importance of local and international influences on secondary school reform.